


Many Hands Make Light Work

by prestissimo



Series: Lost Entries from the Daily Ledger of Nicolas de Lenfent [1]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Codependency, Depression, Drunk Sex, Dubious Consent, F/M, Gaslighting, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Hatred, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 00:36:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19262407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prestissimo/pseuds/prestissimo
Summary: As the Théâtre des Vampires builds his funeral pyre, Nicolas reflects on his last moments.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Contains preparations for self-immolation.

_Many hands make light work_ , as the English say. 

It amuses him. 

A murmur to his right, sound of incense and divine chants in a fulsome tongue he wishes would surround him in its soft, rolling palate. He knows. 

 _I have **heard**  you._ 

Another sound, and he screws his eyelids shut for a moment though it leaves him in a darkness— _noalightacandleanythingpleaseMonsieur—_ that grounds him with gut-seizing terror. Flash of russet waves in the torchlight. The only honest thing about Armand.  _I will miss that._

In the corner of his eye, that finely-lined cowl begins to turn— _pleasedon’tdon'tleavemeherelikethis_ —and he must speak or be reclaimed by the darkness.

“Did I say that out—”

No use asking for forgiveness. Not with the look on that luckless face. But Armand stays with him, at last, at last, and Nicolas is satisfied. They lapse back into silence, watching their co-workers labor. Unless Nicolas has resumed narrating what he sees simply to keep the thread of the plot. Of reality. 

Things are muffled and too-bright. The ringing never quite went away. That’s why he doesn’t hear the steps behind him. He looks at his companion, then turns to Armand, and then turns to…Armand. Oh. What a delightful relief. It’s only double vision. As if he hadn’t had enough of his coven master.

The small cords of wood stop assembling themselves. The cemetery suddenly stills into an assembly of pale ghouls in fine black robes. (They are lined and practical for daily wear. There is no point in tailoring robes for everyone, Nicolas reasons, if they are only going to use them for funerals.) 

Everyone is  _staring_  at him, and his tongue swells inside his mouth, unwieldy and craven. Eleni is there, pale mask gleaming in the torchlight, and the brows on it come together.  _Amazingly lifelike._  He doesn’t mind if he says it out loud. It pains Armand to hear his madness, but Eleni has always accepted it as a matter of course. 

“ _Ma soeur_.”

Slowly, as if she is gentling a wounded animal, she curls her fingers around his trembling hands.  _No, don’t,_ he wants to say, but those days are over and she will not take his blood. Not again. Does he know he was, is, laughing, shrieking, giggling? Does he know he was talking to himself?

“I was…trying to—I was trying to ask Armand—”

It is difficult to swallow. Everyone is  _staring. They took his hands!_  The only friends he had left to love. Shh, shh, shh.

“Shh.”

Her voice purrs across him and he struggles to see past the light and look upon the moon of her lovely, traitorous face. These once-familiar shapes and colors throb with incomprehension. Her hands are tight on his fingers and it’s awful to think he can feel them even detached. Her mask melts into a poorly-concealed look disappointment.

When she begins to speak, the cemetery blurs into motion once more, the statues pretending to be deaf to her condemnation. Armand will come soon. Nicolas must be patient. She draws his eye down to his wrists, where she wrenches sobs from him as her thumb scrapes across the onion-skin redness that has yet to heal. It unleashes his words from muteness all at once, but everyone is accustomed to that by now.

_They were supposed to fix it! I was supposed to be better when I got them back! Nothing has changed!_

She knows, she knows. She softens. They are his hands, she promises. But she cannot promise they will feel like his before he cooks. He cannot get the idea out of his head. Some time in his youth, a cold darkness crept into his heart and crouched upon the doorstep of his soul. Will he still be conscious when the fire finally melts him down? He has felt cold for so long.

“I will be warm soon enough,” he reassures her, sounding almost normal, sounding as if he is not on the crest of vomiting a sob, sounding poised and nineteen and still seeking a cure for  _being himself_.

This time, he hears his giggle, and it sounds broken and weak and not like himself. When was the last time he laughed? He tries for something jovial, and she slams her palms over his mouth in horror. Her hands smear a warmth against his face that he cannot feel inside this vessel he haunts. Her eyes are as dark as his own and it hurts to see them, but it is that or watch them build his funeral pyre. She takes her hands away and the warmth disappears.

Unlike Monsieur Spare Bassoon, temporarily Monsieur Broken Chin, Eleni is too gracious to ask Nicolas to assist. Did the mad ones before pick up the twigs and kindling with their own hands and caress them as they burned, like fast, familiar friends to the last? Perhaps they will melt the ice in his own fingers. He will feel them just as the fire reaches them. 

Nicolas visited the other side of madness only after crossing great expanses of suffering. (He cannot not go the way he came.) Eleni asks him something Armand already knows: why choose the pyre and the ancient rites? Why not something quicker and less painful? 

He draws his lips into a smile that feels obscene, even though it makes Eleni’s expression brighten. It is easier to see her when she makes the mask speak, but a gentleman would never comment upon a lady’s personal appearance. 

If he answers truthfully, they will laugh at him, and the ambiance of the fantasy will be ruined. Nicolas knows everyone dies alone. These tormentor-friends, gaoler-lovers, dependent-caretakers, and co-worker employees hold little love and less that can be called tender affection or friendship so much as a mutual derisive familiarity. 

Even if their squabbling, uncivil disunion brings him no triumphal requiem, Nicolas clutches at the legacy of mad ones over  _centuries_  of vampire history. He dies as himself. He dies with dreamers, storytellers, and liars. He shall not die alone, and he shall be warm at last. 

 


	2. You Smell Delicious

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Nicolas is trapped inside the cage at Les Innocents and repeatedly drained, he struggles for meaning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: torture, mental instability, unreliable narrator

 

I had managed to slump against the rough wooden bars of my cage, just enough to halt the constant nausea. Everything was pain. I could barely muster the energy to breathe, but I was determined I would not die upon a medieval pyre the way the witches had done.

“…taking so long? I say we go into the city—” one of my tormentors had entered, talking to another ghoul in black rags.

“Shh. This is him? He smells terrified,” his companion said with relish. I tried to shy away from her ghastly white face, but all I could manage was a wordless whine that escaped before I could stop it.

“Aww, poor thing,” the visitor continued. She looked around conspiratorially and stage-whispered, “If you make it out in the next five minutes, I’ll carry you to the surface! It should give you a chance,  _n’cest-ce pas_?”

They were mocking me, I knew, but I had to try, even with every last ounce of my will. What else was left to me? With desperate, blind shoves of my disobedient naked hands and feet, I maneuvered my beaten, aching form to the little door. I stared at it, disoriented, famished, and thirstier than I had ever been. The cage was unfamiliar, the rough knots and splinters on its bars different from my previous position, and stupidly I thrust my useless hands at the lock. My fingers refused to obey, and it was as if I had no more than swollen stumps to tear at the latch.

Tears were rising in my eyes, water I desperately needed to keep, and my mouth was twisting into an ugly shape. I had to, I had to do this, this might be my only chance! They’d come back, they’d keep—I shuddered, paralyzed as memories assaulted me of their blows upon my body and inside my mind. Hours they had tormented me ceaselessly, trading places once their comrades tired. A desperate laugh escaped me. Until their  _comrades_ tired! What of  _myself_? Wasn’t I due any relief? Where was the justice?

The white face at the lock suddenly appeared, making me draw back, then pitch forward and crash against the door. It was a crude and pitiful attempt, one of a condemned man, and the face laughed. I moaned despite myself, the fear surging across my mind as my body shuddered in agony.

“Ah, I am fond of you already,” she said, cupping me on the cheek while I trembled in terror. “Your five minutes are up, and you do smell so delicious.”

She reached through the bars as I shied from her with a whimper, and her claws dug deep enough to draw blossoming crimson flowers across my torn sleeve. I landed hard against the bars. 

“No, no, p-p-pplease, noonono—AAGH!”

I choked as she sank her fangs viciously deep into where my neck met my shoulder, the agony juddering through me like electric wire. My lifeless body smashed into the sharp and rough knots of the wood as it jolted against her  pull. Every ounce of my fluttering heart shuddered and struggled to pump enough blood to satisfy her demands. The softest sound began to leak from the back of my throat, beyond my control or awareness. 

Yet the rape of my body was nothing compared to the wreckage she was claiming inside my mind, running through it and smashing windows, making sure my thoughts scrambled and my hopes were contaminated with every fear and hate and want I’d ever had. When she finally released me, I lay limp against the bars, weeping ever so softly, my flesh smashed against itself with no order to my limbs.

“Shall we give you another try?” she asked with an angel’s smile. When I shied away from the door, shaking like a leaf, she only laughed as if I were acting silly. She reached for my arm once more. I began to scream. I have not really stopped since.

I found out her name later, when she asked me why I was in my old dressing room tearing the place apart in a rage. Her name was Eugénie, and she’d always thought I smelled wonderful.


End file.
